Slooooow boot
 

Hi,

Installed Slackware 14 (32) on my nephew's 9 year old P4 (full install). Everything worked fine and after installation I rebooted. Everything OK.
After installing some additional software & configuring I rebooted and nothing happened (it seemed)
After several reboots (tried the DVD to boot, didn't do anything) it just wouldn't boot, never got into LILO. Pressing Del or F1 to enter BIOS didn't seem to do anything. But after a few minutes(!) it actually booted.
So it takes several minutes to boot the system or DVD.
Once booted, all is well.
Anyone an idea what is wrong?

Installed LILO to MBR, custom install.

This is a shot in the dark (even your epression 'did'nt do anything' are the same :) ).
Anyway I think for some reasons that you are not actually seeing lilo. What I would suggest is change lilo.conf - change the timeout value to 30 (3 seconds that is) and use the vga value to vga=773.
Hope this solves your issue.

Thanks for the response, but I'm pretty sure that's not the problem. Perhaps I haven't made myself clear enough.
Once the LILO screen appears, everything goes smoothly. It just takes several minutes (± 3 - 4 minutes) before you get to the LILO-prompt.
The only thing you see is the message that you can setup BIOS (or something like that) by pressing F1 or Del. But doing that only works after several minutes!
The same goes for booting a DVD: ± 3 - 4 minutes before anything happens.
It wasn't like that before installing, and the first reboot went well too.

LILO is set to boot after 5 seconds, by the way.

You might want to check out your bios and make sure that the HDD that you've installed slackware on is set up as the first boot device. Disable USB and CDROM's as boot devices and see if that will speed up your times.

Usually at stop at this point means that the BIOS has problems with finding and initializing the hardware. From my experience it is most likely a faulty harddisk or connector cable. Since installing a new system and additional software sets the harddisk under stress this may not be unlikely for an older disk to get either faulty or for a cable to loosen itself a bit. At first I would try to open the system and press slightly on the connector cables to make sure that they have a proper seat. When you have the machine open anyways I would recommend to also remove all dust from the system.
Then try it again.
If that doesn't help download the harddisk manufacturer's diagnosis program and test the disk.

I basically agree with TobiSGD. It sounds like the hdd is starting to puke. At 9 years old it's getting rough around the edges and a new installation of *any* 'full-use of hdd' OS could have set it over the edge. Especially so if it's never been on a UPS and brown-outs and blackouts have hit the system, which is extremely rough on hdd's. My personal experience has been 8 years on a hdd and then one day it just stopped being able to read/write.

OK, thanks you all. We'll try the suggestions and hope the HD isn't dying.
Will report back (may take a week...).

I have this problem with one of my computers, and for me it is related to USB connected hard drives. I don't have a solution, but I do have a workaround. When I have to reboot that computer (which is rarely) I unplug all USB devices (I have them connected through a single hub, so it is easy). Then the LILO prompt comes up quickly. Otherwise it takes ages.

Brian

That did it. :hattip:
Sometimes solutions are a lot simpler than expected...

Thanks everybody for the responses.